future workfuture work:
TRANSCRIPT
FUTURE WORKFUTURE WORKFUTURE WORKFUTURE WORK: : : :
Jobs, selfJobs, selfJobs, selfJobs, self----employment and leisure employment and leisure employment and leisure employment and leisure
after the industrial ageafter the industrial ageafter the industrial ageafter the industrial age
by
James Robertson
Section 1
This section contains the 2006 Preface, the Contents page, the Introduction and Part 1, including Chapters 1 to 4. Notes and references for the chapters in this section can be found at the end of this document. Sections 2 and 3 containing all the other chapters can be downloaded from http://www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm Initially published by Gower/Maurice Temple Smith, 1985 Now out of print
ISBN 0 85117 259 8 (hardback); 0 85117 260 1 (paperback) Copyright © James Robertson 1985
Passages from the book may be quoted wlthout permission,Passages from the book may be quoted wlthout permission,Passages from the book may be quoted wlthout permission,Passages from the book may be quoted wlthout permission, provided that the source isprovided that the source isprovided that the source isprovided that the source is also quoted. also quoted. also quoted. also quoted.
James Robertson The Old Bakehouse Cholsey OXON OX10 9NU Email: [email protected] Web: www.jamesrobertson.com
Future Work www.jamesrobertson.com
FUTURE
WORK
Jobs, self-employment and leisure
after the industrial age
JAMES ROBERTSON
Gower/Maurice Temple Smith
Future Work www.jamesrobertson.com
© James Robertson 1985
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of Gower Publishing
Company Limited.
Published by
Gower Publishing Company Limited,
Gower House,
Croft Road,
Aldershot,
Hants GU11 3HR,
England
Reprinted 1987
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Robertson, James
Future work : jobs, self-employment and leisure
after the industrial age.
1. Industrial sociology 2. Technology—Social
aspects
I. Title
306'.36 HD6955
ISBN 0 85117 259 8 (hardback); 0 85117 260 1 (paperback)
Typeset by Book Ens, Saffron Walden, Essex
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
[Note: All rights having reverted to me, passages from the book may now be
quoted without permission, provided that the source is also quoted.
Apart from the addition of the short 2006 Preface, the transfer of Chapter 1's Annex
to the end of the chapter, and the omission of blank but notionally numbered pages
(e.g. before and after the introductory pages to different Parts of the published 1985
text), the text here is virtually identical with the 1985 book.
James Robertson, February 2006.]
Future Work: 2006 Preface www.jamesrobertson.com
ii
2006 Preface
1. The message of this book is that world society is in the
early stage of a 'great transformation' of the kind that has
occurred from time to time in history, affecting every aspect of
human life. One of its outcomes could be a liberation of work,
taking further the earlier progressions from slavery to serfdom,
and then from serfdom to employment — all three of which have
involved most people working for a minority superior to
themselves. As that liberation takes place, more and more of us
will work more freely under our own control than conventional
employment has allowed. We will do what we see to be our own
good, useful and rewarding work — for ourselves, other people
and society as a whole. In Future Work I called it "ownwork".
2. Reading the book again has reminded me of the ferment of
ideas about the future of work that was taking place in the early
mid-1980s. How relevant are those ideas now? Have they been
by-passed by the new economic orthodoxy of Thatcherism and
Reaganism, by the collapse of state-based communism and
socialism, and by the unstoppable 'progress' of globalised
capitalism in the past twenty years?
The answer is No, they haven't been by-passed. Quite the
reverse. The situation now is even more relevant to those ideas
than when the book first came out.
3. Such 'progress' as there has been in the past twenty years
has been destroying the ecosystems of our planet to a point
where people all over the world now realise that the future of the
human species and many other species is endangered.
Globalised capitalism in its present form has been systematically
widening the gap between rich and poor countries, and between
rich and poor people in every country, to a point increasingly
seen as intolerable and unsustainable. In international meetings
many 'developing' countries have now begun to exert effective
opposition to the clearly unjust system of international trading
and finance that has been imposed on them by the Euro-
American powers. Combined with the growing strength and
economic power of countries like China and India and Brazil, this
Future Work: 2006 Preface www.jamesrobertson.com
iii
is beginning to spell the end of the 500-year period of Euro-
American world domination and leadership.
4. All this means that from now on, in one way or another,
world development is going to take a new direction. This will
bring changes to national economies in the kinds of work people
do, the ways they work, and the way society organises work.
It has become clear already, in countries like Britain, that
problems to do with employment and unemployment haven't
gone away. The official unemployment figures may have gone
down in the last twenty years, but the number of people now
receiving disability benefits (instead of unemployment benefits)
has gone up so much that the government has decided it is out
of control. The number of people in employment has increased
partly because both parents of young children have increasingly
found it financially necessary for to get a job outside the home,
and the government has positively compelled many single
mothers to do so. So increasing numbers of young children are
now being brought up in ways that may adversely affect their
economic performance and social behaviour as adolescents and
adults. Moreover, many of the new jobs created in the past
twenty years are not pensionable. Indeed, in general the ability
and readiness of employers to contribute to pensions for their
employees is declining. The old 1945 assumption that most
people will be able to rely on employment to provide them with a
decent pension when they retire has to be questioned. The
prospect is of a pensions crisis not many years ahead.
5. Those are some reasons why the prospect of a breakdown
in the employment way of organising work is just as relevant
now as twenty years ago. But more positive, forward-looking
factors in favour of the Future Work approach must be mentioned
too.
a) Projects by the New Economics Foundation —
http://www.neweconomics.org — and other similar
organisations have been generating practical understanding
and practical experience of that approach to the future of
work at local level.
b) Practical proposals have also now been worked out for a systematic reconstruction of the scoring system for the
Future Work: 2006 Preface www.jamesrobertson.com
iv
game of economic life at every level — which will, among
its other beneficial outcomes, make it easier for people and
localities to control their own economic lives. See, for
example, http://www.jamesrobertson.com/articles.htm
c) It has become common for politicians and commentators to
voice concepts like 'social entrepreneur' and 'enabling public
policies', which were originally floated in the 1970s and
1980s in books like The Sane Alternative and Future Work.
The rhetoric still needs to be effectively backed with
practice, but it suggests a greater readiness than existed
twenty years ago to move in the new direction.
6. Re-reading Future Work recalled my excitement at some of
the historical and philosophical, political and economic ideas I
encountered while researching for it. I refer particularly to the
chapters in Parts 2 and 3 on "Changing Perceptions of Work" and
"The End of the Employment Empire" — and to topics like: how
changes in the valuation of work have come hand in hand with
new developments in the philosophy of economics; the parallels
and contrasts between the medieval role of religion and the
modern role of money; and the match between Kondratieff long
waves in the economy and periodical realignments in political
structure. These still seem to me to be relevant to the challenge
of the future of work today.
7. Finally, I should say a word about the financing of a
Citizen's Income. I referred to it in Future Work as a guaranteed
basic income (GBI). The subject index shows several references
to it. The most important passage is in pages 166-177. It
foreshadows the conclusion I have come to now, but had not
reached firmly then.
It is that a basic Citizen's Income should be one element in a
larger reconstruction of the system of money and finance. It
should replace an equivalent amount of existing public spending.
It should be financed by new sources of public revenue which will
replace an equivalent amount of existing taxes on incomes, value
added and business profits. The new sources of public revenue
will include taxes on common resources, such as the value of
unimproved land and unextracted energy, along with new non-
Future Work: 2006 Preface www.jamesrobertson.com
v
tax revenue such as the profit from creating additions to another
common resource — the national money supply.
The development of these proposals since 1985 can be traced
in the following texts on this website.
a) The 1994 discussion paper "Benefits and Taxes: A Radical Strategy" for the New Economics Foundation
proposed a ten-year programme to introduce a Citizen's
Income financed from taxing land values and energy
instead of taxing incomes, profits and value added. See
http://www.jamesrobertson.com/toes-nef.htm
b) The 2000 book "Creating New Money: A Monetary
Reform for the Information Age", written jointly with
Joseph Huber for the New Economics Foundation,
contains a thoroughly worked out proposal that money
creation should be transferred from the commercial
banks to an agency of the state, which would give it to
the government to spend into circulation debt-free.
http://www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm - creating
c) The December 2005 article on "The Future of Money: If
We Want a Better Game of Economic Life, We'll Have to
Change the Scoring System" — in the journal
"Soundings" (issue 31) — included monetary reform,
land value taxation and a Citizen's Income, as
systemically related institutional changes for a new
political economy, based on fairly sharing the value of
common resources
http://www.jamesrobertson.com/articles.htm
James Robertson, February 2006
Future Work www.jamesrobertson.com
vi
Contents
Introduction
PART 1: WHAT COMES AFTER THE EMPLOYMENT AGE? 1
Chapter 1. Possible Futures for Work 3 A Post-Industrial Age 3
Two Visions of Post-Industrial Society 4 Three Futures for Work 5
Three Possible Futures 6 Chapter 2. A Realistic Assessment 17
The Four-Sector Economy 17
Restoring Full Employment - A Realistic Goal? 20 Leisure in Place of Work - A Realistic Goal? 24
The Significance of Ownwork 26 Chapter 3. The Age of Employment 28
Pre-Industrial Patterns of Work 28 The Situation Now 29
Employment as Dependency 30 Masculine, Impersonal Work 31
Exclusive Nature of Employment 33 Dependency of Local Communities 35
Limits to Employment 38 Chapter 4. A Change of Direction 39
Energy 40 Technology 41
Environment 42
Leisure 44 Education and Training 47
Incomes 48 Capital, Investment, Land 50
PART 2: CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF WORK 53
Chapter 5. The Work Ethic Evolves 55
The Protestant Reformation 56 Attitudes to Time and Money 58
A Work Ethic for All 60 Change as Liberation and Progress 62
Work Ethic or Leisure Ethic? 63 A New Work Ethic 68
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Chapter 6. Changing Worldview, Changing Values 71
The Industrial-Age Outlook 71 A Post-Industrial Worldview 73
Shifting Values 76 Masculine and Feminine 79
Men's Work and Women's Work 81 Equal Opportunities 83
The Feminisation of Work 87 Chapter 7.The Valuation of Work 89
The Theory of the Just Price 90 The Labour Theory of Value 91
The Neo-Classical Economists 97 The Supremacv of Quantitative Values 100
The Failure of Quantitative valuation 102 Pointers for the Future 105
PART 3: THE END OF THE EMPLOYMENT EMPIRE 107
Chapter 8. Labour 109 Defensive Posture 110
The Lucas Initiative 113 Work Rights and Responsibilities 116
Depersonalisation 119 Transformation of the Working Class 121
Chapter 9. Money 126 Money Now Dominant 126
Possibilities for the Future 128 Money and Ownwork 130
Positive and Negative Effects 133 A ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’? 135
Chapter 10. Politics and Government 137
Political Alignments during the Industrial Age 137 Possible Futures for Politics and Government 138
A Scenario 141 Collapse or Decolonisation 144
PART 4: PRACTICALITIES OF THE TRANSITION 147
Chapter 11. The Shift to Ownwork Has Already Begun 149
Personal Ownwork 150 Local Ownwork - 152
Business and Industry 156 Local Government 159
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viii
Central Government and International
Government Agencies 161 Other Institutions 162
Chapter 12. The Ownwork Agenda 165 Personal Incomes 165
Access to Workspace, Land and Capital 173 Local Economic Development 177
Technology 180 Education, Training, Leisure 182
Economics, Social Sciences, Management Sciences 183 Key Institutions 184
Conclusion
Appendix 1 A Note on Paradigm Shifts 191
Appendix 2 An Ownwork Checklist 193
Notes and References 196
Publications Index 209
Name Index 213
Subject Index 217
Future Work: Introduction www.jamesrobertson.com
ix
Introduction
In Britain today several million people are unemployed. In the
industrialised countries as a whole the number runs into tens of
millions. For third world countries the situation is even worse. In
1982 the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimated that
a thousand million new jobs would have to be created by the
year 2000 in order to achieve full employment worldwide. The
Director-General of the ILO commented at the time: "It has to be
fully understood that there will be no situation of full employment
if we are speaking of conventional employment."1* Things have
got worse, not better, since then.
Most conventional politicians and economists still seem to
claim, though with diminishing assurance, that their particular
policies will bring back full employment in the long run. But, year
by year, more and more people see these claims as utopian
wishful thinking, if not downright deception. The impact of
labour-saving technology, the competitive pressures of
international trade, and the reluctance of taxpayers to finance
more public service jobs, clearly suggest that, if substantial
economic growth ever does come back as we still understand it,
much of it is likely to be jobless growth. More and more people
now feel in their bones, not only that many years of high
unemployment lie ahead, but that full employment will never
return again. They yearn for realistic and responsible leaders who
will admit this possibility, and be prepared to respond to the new
situation it implies.
The appropriate responses must be both practical and visionary.
Practical action is needed urgently to ease the problems of the
millions of people who face the prospect of unemployment now.
Any society which continues to propagate the job ethic and to -------------
* Notes and References are as in 1985. Download Section 3 of the book.
Future Work: Introduction www.jamesrobertson.com
x
link basic incomes with jobs, but which leaves millions of people
jobless, will continue to inflict great damage on those people and
on itself. But, to be effective, practical action will also have to be
visionary. The measures taken to alleviate the immediate
problems of unemployment now will have to provide stepping-
stones — and be seen to provide stepping-stones — to new ways
of organising work, different from conventional employment, for
the future.
As I shall show, there are three positive views about the
future of work, leaving aside the purely pessimistic view that the
present unemployment crisis will lead to disaster or continuing
decline. The first is that something like full employment will
return, and that employment will remain the normal and
dominant way of organising work. The second is that full
employment will not return, and that we have now begun the
transition to a leisure society in which leisure will replace jobs as
the central life activity for increasing numbers of people. The
third is that full employment will not return, but that for
increasing numbers of people it will be replaced by self-organised
work, or 'ownwork'.
Ownwork means activity which is purposeful and important,
and which people organise and control for themselves. It may be
either paid or unpaid. It is done by people as individuals and as
household members; it is done by groups of people working
together; and it is done by people, who live in a particular
locality, working locally to meet local needs. For the individual
and the household, ownwork may mean self-employment,
essential household and family activities, productive leisure
activities such as do-it-yourself or growing some of one's own
food, and participation in voluntary work. For groups of people,
ownwork may mean working together as partners, perhaps in a
community enterprise or a cooperative, or in a multitude of other
activities with social, economic, environmental, scientific or other
purposes in which they have a personal interest and to which
they attach personal importance. For localities, the significance of
ownwork is that it contributes to local self-reliance, an increased
local capacity to meet local needs by local work, and a reduction
of dependence on outside employers and suppliers.
Future Work: Introduction www.jamesrobertson.com
xi
The actual future will, of course, contain employment, leisure
and ownwork — all three. There will almost certainly still be
conventional jobs for many people; there will almost certainly be
some increase in leisure, perhaps for most people; and ownwork
will almost certainly play a larger part in many people's lives and
in the life of society as a whole.
But it will be the third of these — the expansion of ownwork —
that provides the key to the future of work and leisure. Only the
expansion of ownwork will create conditions in which the
problems of employment and leisure will be satisfactorily
resolved. Only the expansion of ownwork will reflect the shift of
values underlying the transition to a post-industrial future which
has now begun. Only the expansion of ownwork can bring about
the next stage in the liberation of work foreshadowed by the
earlier historical progression from slavery to serfdom, and then
from serfdom to employment.
That is the theme of this book. The book is directly concerned
with the future of work in today's industrialised countries. But the
same theme is powerfully relevant to the future of third world
countries too. First, as ownwork plays an increasing part in the
economics of the rich countries, those countries will become less
exploitative of third world economies. Second, the principle of
ownwork underlies the prospect of a new path of self-reliant
economic development — 'another development'2 — no less for
the poor countries than for the rich. Third, in so far as people in
the poor countries still look to the rich for the model of
development to follow, the expansion of ownwork in the
industrialised countries will support those in the third world who
are trying to lead their countries along a more self-reliant path.
Part 1 of the book explores the three possible futures for work,
and assesses how realistic each is. It reviews the key features of
work during the employment age, and suggests that these will
need to be fundamentally changed as part of the transition to a
new work order for a post-industrial society. It gives a broad
impression of what a shift of emphasis from employment to
ownwork will imply, for example for energy, technology, the
environment, leisure, education and training, money incomes,
Future Work: Introduction www.jamesrobertson.com
xii
investment, and access to capital and land.
Part 2 examines how people's perceptions of work have
changed in the past, especially in the transition from the middle
ages to the modern period culminating in the industrial age. It
discusses how the Protestant work ethic evolved, and what
pointers this gives us now to the possible emergence of a new
work ethic, based on ownwork, for the post-industrial age. It
relates the rise of the Protestant work ethic to the change in
worldview and values that marked the end of the middle ages
and the beginning of the modern period; and it suggests that a
comparable change in worldview and values is taking place today
which will help to shape the new work ethic now. It considers the
changes that have taken place in our ways of evaluating work, as
an aspect of the development of economic theory, and suggests
that further changes in economic thinking will accompany the
shift from employment to ownwork.
Part 3 shows that the power structures of late industrial
society have been shaped by the fact that employment has been
the dominant form of work. It suggests, in particular, that
today's organised labour movement, financial system, and
system of representative politics and bureaucratic government
can all be seen as superstructures arising out of the employment
way of organising work; or, to put the same thing another way,
that they are interlocking parts of an employment empire which
has made the people of industrialised countries more and more
dependent on it. The shift from employment to ownwork will
erode the foundations of these superstructures, at least to some
extent. In a sense, it will mark the end of the employment
empire. In this end-of-empire process, many people now
dependent on employment will face the challenge of liberating
themselves from this dependence; and many people working
within the existing power structures will be called on to
decolonise them and to manage their decline constructively.
Part 4 fills out some of the detail of this approach. It deals
with the practicalities of the shift to ownwork. It first shows that
in many particulars this shift may already be under way and
accelerating in the last few years. It then outlines an ownwork
agenda, and examines how some of the changes proposed may
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xiii
be taken up by, and may affect, various sections of society —
individual people, localities, businesses, government agencies
and other professions and institutions. At the same time, Part 4
makes clear that no one should expect — or wait for — the
ownwork agenda, and the shift from employment to ownwork, to
be carried out according to any coherent or systematic plan. No
government, for example, can realistically be expected to make
the ownwork agenda a basis for its policy programme, until it has
become clear to everyone that the shift towards ownwork is
already far advanced. For the most part, the ownwork agenda
will be carried out by the piecemeal interaction of initiatives and
responses, the initiatives coming mainly from a wide diversity of
individuals and unofficial groups, and the responses coming from
the established institutions of society.
There is one further point to be made by way of introduction. I
am sometimes asked what a society based on ownwork rather
than on employment will be like and how it will function. Many
detailed aspects of the answer to this question will be found in
the chapters which follow. For example I see the move towards
ownwork as a move towards a more self-reliant society, more
decentralised, more equal as between men and women, better
equipped with effective small-scale technologies, more
committed to a high quality of life, and so on. But, in a more
general sense, I believe the question itself is misleading. I have
never thought it realistic to try to lay down a blueprint for a
future society. For one thing, whatever may have happened in
the past, I don't think a static society is likely to exist in the
future. For another, I am more concerned with what is to be
done now, than with the precise detail of what things may be like
at some future date.
Rather than lay down a blueprint for an ownwork society, then,
my purpose in this book is to convey a clear impression of the
change of direction in the development of work that is needed
now, as we step forward on the next stage of our journey from
the past into the present and on into the future. We are coming
to the end of the employment stage. We have reached the limit
of progress in that direction. Two ways forward present
themselves — the leisure route and the ownwork route. My
Future Work: Introduction www.jamesrobertson.com
xiv
aims are the comparatively limited, but practical, ones: of
explaining why the ownwork route is the one we should take; of
giving a reasonably clear idea of what is likely to be involved in
setting out upon this new path now; and of providing material for
discussion and further exploration towards that end (see
Appendix 2 for a checklist of relevant questions).
In the last few years I have read many books, articles and
papers about the future of work. I have taken part in numerous
conferences and meetings on the subject, in North America,
Australia, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe, as well as in
this country. These have been organised by businesses and
business schools, government agencies, universities, professional
organisations, religious bodies, and many different kinds of local
groups. All over the industrialised world people are now asking
what comes after full employment, and are beginning to confront
the possibilities for change. I have learnt much from many of
them.3
It would be impossible for me to acknowledge my debt to all
who, in these and in other ways, have contributed to my
thinking. Many are mentioned in the Notes and References at the
end. Many others were mentioned in my last book.4 But my main
debt of gratitude, once again, is to my wife, Alison Pritchard. She
has worked with me throughout. Her contribution has been
indispensable.
Future Work: Part 1: After The Employment Age? www.jamesrobertson.com
1
PART 1
WHAT COMES AFTER
THE EMPLOYMENT AGE?
In Part 1 we explore three possible futures for work, and
assess how realistic each is. We review the key features of work
during the employment age, and suggest that these will need to
be fundamentally changed as part of the transition to a new work
order for a post-industrial society. We give a broad impression of
what a shift of emphasis from employment to ownwork will
imply, for example for energy, technology, the environment,
leisure, education and training, money incomes, investment, and
access to capital and land.
Future Work: 1. Possible Futures for Work www.jamesrobertson.com
3
1
Possible Futures For Work
A Post-Industrial Age?
At times of uncertainty like the present, different people
perceive the future in different ways. There are at least three
distinct views about the future of work. The keyword for the first
is employment. The keyword for the second is leisure. The
keyword for the third is ownwork. They are based on three
distinct perceptions of the future of industrialised society. I call
these Business As Usual, HE (Hyper-Expansionist) and SHE
(Sane, Humane, Ecological). Business As Usual assumes that the
society of the future will not be very different from late industrial
society as it is today. HE and SHE are contrasting visions of a
post-industrial society which, in either case, will be distinctly
different from the society we have today.
Some people dislike the term 'post-industrial'. They find it an
ugly, woolly word that tells us nothing about the future. They say
it is no more informative than if we called the great
transformation of the 18th and 19th centuries the 'post-
agricultural' revolution, and the age which it brought in the 'post-
agricultural' age. And they point out that industry will continue to
exist for the foreseeable future.
However, the idea of a post-industrial future does suggest that
we are coming to the end of the period of history which we call
the industrial age, and that a new age is beginning. It helps to
prepare us for the possibility of a post-industrial transformation
of society no less fundamental than the industrial revolution
brought in. It prompts such questions as: what will post-
industrial society be like? And what do we want it to be like?
As a matter of historical fact, the term 'industrial revolution'
did not come into use until long after the main events to which it
refers, by which time the defining characteristic of post-
agricultural society had become clear. We do not yet know what
Future Work: 1. Possible Futures for Work www.jamesrobertson.com
4
the most apt description of the post-industrial age will be. Those
who now try to describe it as the Space Age, or the Age of
Aquarius, or the Communication Age, or the Information Age, or
the Age of Automation, or whatever, are usually doing no more
than emphasising the aspect of the post-industrial era which
particularly interests them.
So far as industry is concerned, of course it will not cease to
exist in the post-industrial age, any more than farms and
churches ceased to exist when the industrial age came in. The
point is that, just as the dominant features of industrial society
were quite different from those of the agricultural and religious
society which it succeeded, so the dominant values, lifestyles,
practices, institutions and modes of thought in a post-industrial
society will be different from those that have been dominant in
the industrial age.
Two Visions of Post-Industrial Society1
One vision of post-industrial society — the 'HE' vision of the
future — might more accurately be described as superindustrial.
It is a vision of a future based on big science, big technology and
expert know-how. Its dominant drives and features would be
those of industrial society accentuated and writ large. One of its
most prominent exponents, the futurist Herman Kahn, used to
say that we are now only half way through the period of
expansion and growth that has been typical of the industrial age.
We have had 200 years of it, and there is another 200 years to
go.
By contrast, the 'SHE' vision of the future foresees, not an
acceleration along the same path of development we have
followed during the industrial age, but a change in the direction
of development. According to this view, the industrial revolution
marked a huge advance in the capacity of human beings to
control and harness the material world. It vastly extended the
technical limits to human achievement, and amplified our
physical capabilities — to travel, to communicate, to build, to
provide ourselves with heat and power and light, to produce all
manner of goods and commodities, and to organise ourselves in
millions for peace and war. Today it has brought about changes
Future Work: 1. Possible Futures for Work www.jamesrobertson.com
5
in the institutions of society and in people's personal lives that
few people living 200 years ago could possibly have foreseen, or
even imagined. So, as the industrial age comes to an end, a
comparable transformation may be in prospect — a post-
industrial revolution which could bring about an advance no less
far-reaching than the industrial revolution did. This time,
however, the breakthrough will be primarily psychological and
social, not technical and economic. It will enlarge the human
limits to human achievement. It will amplify our capacity to
develop ourselves as human beings, together with the
communities and the societies in which we live. Not only will it
bring fundamental social and personal change, as the industrial
revolution did, but that is what will be its main motive force.
These two contrasting visions of post-industrial society have
emerged quite clearly in the last few years. Some of their main
values and tendencies are shown in these two columns.
HE SHE
quantitative values and goals qualitative values and goals
economic growth human development
organisational values and personal and inter-personal
goals values and goals
money values real needs and aspirations
contractual relationships mutual exchange relationships
intellectual, rational, intuitive, experiential,
detached empathetic
masculine priorities feminine priorities
specialisation/helplessness all-round competence
technocracy/dependency self-reliance
centralising local
urban country-wide
European planetary
anthropocentric ecological
These two visions of a post-industrial future provide the two
poles, and the two clusters of ideas and possibilities, around
which serious discussion of the future, including the future of
work, is likely to revolve from now on. The Annex to this Chapter
outlines some of the practical differences between them and
'Business As Usual'.
Future Work: 1. Possible Futures for Work www.jamesrobertson.com
6
Three Futures For Work
The Business-As-Usual view of the future of work is still
voiced, though with diminishing conviction, by politicians and
economists of all mainstream persuasions, and by most business
leaders and trade union leaders, in all the industrial countries.
They do not question, at least not in public, that employment will
remain the dominant form of work and that full employment
ought to be restored. They suggest that it can be restored if the
particular policies which they support are adopted. For some this
means bringing back high levels of employment in conventional
manufacturing industry. For others it means replacing jobs lost in
manufacturing by a great increase of jobs elsewhere: in
information services like computing and telecommunications; in
sectors of the knowledge industry like research and consultancy;
in social services like education and health; and in leisure
industries and services like sports, entertainment, and travel.
Some hope that, by making the economy internationally
competitive, the resulting creation of wealth will automatically
generate enough jobs for all. Micawberlike, they ask us to have
faith that new jobs will turn up, though they cannot tell us what
these jobs will be or how they will be created. Others, by
contrast, hope that by insulating the national economy from
international competition and by planning it centrally, they will be
able to organise enough jobs for all.
Because we have become so accustomed to these various
expressions of the Business-As-Usual view, we have tended to
forget how much they take for granted and, until quite recently,
we have often failed to notice how large an element of utopian
wishful thinking they contain.
The HE view of the future of work appeals to many scientists,
technologists, industrialists and business commentators who, as
most people do, see the future primarily from their own point of
view. They expect the existing polarisation between skilled and
unskilled workers, employed and unemployed, to continue to the
point where all the important work is done by a minority of highly
skilled and highly responsible people. These people will be
putting the space colonies into orbit, installing and monitoring
the automated factories, managing the nuclear power stations,
running the psychiatric institutes and genetic laboratories,
Future Work: 1. Possible Futures for Work www.jamesrobertson.com
7
operating the communications networks, and carrying out all the
other highly skilled tasks on which a super-industrial society will
depend. The rest of us will be living lives of leisure. As in past
societies, the prevailing pattern of work in the HE future will
reflect a division between superior and inferior members of
society. But the division will no longer be between masters and
slaves, lords and serfs, employers and employees. This time it
will be between workers and drones. The working minority will
monopolise all the important work and exclude the rest of the
population from it — at best permitting them to undertake
marginal, menial tasks.
Because we have become accustomed to accept the authority,
in their own specialist fields, of those who support the HE view of
the future of work, we have sometimes tended to forget the
political, social and psychological realities which it ignores, and
have failed to notice how large an element of utopian, 'mad
scientist' fantasy it contains.
The SHE view of the future of work, by contrast, sees the
historical progression from masters-and-slaves to lords-and-serfs
and then to employers-and-employees as an unfinished progress
towards greater equality. It now envisages a further step in that
direction. As hopes of restoring full employment fade away, the
dominant form of work will no longer be seen as employment but
as self-organised activity. In other words, many more people will
take control of their own work. They will work on their own
account, to meet their own needs, to achieve their own purposes,
in their own households and local communities, on a personal
and inter-personal basis, to a very much greater extent than the
prevailing pattern of work in the industrial age has allowed them
to do. The direction in which work will develop in the SHE future
will represent a reversal of some of the dominant trends of the
industrial age. Thus, as we shall see, the informal economy* will
become one of the main areas for further economic growth and
social progress. A fulfilling, well-balanced life will be regarded as
* In principle, I use the term 'informal economy' to include activities in which
people do things for themselves and one another without being paid, as contrasted
with the 'formal economy' in which work takes the form of paid employment. In
practice, the distinction is often blurred. For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 7.
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one that offers a flexible choice of work patterns; and part-time
work in the formal economy and part-time work in the informal
economy will come to be seen as the norm. Ownwork will be the
characteristic form of work in the new work order.
Because the majority of people in late industrial societies have
perceived themselves as dependent employees and consumers,
and because powerful interest groups of all kinds have done
everything they could to reinforce that perception of social
reality, it has been easy to dismiss as a romantic, utopian dream
the idea of a new work order based on ownwork. It is only in the
last few years that this idea has begun to be realistically
appraised, as a practical response to the worsening prospects for
conventional employment.2
Future Work: Annex to Chapter 1: Three Possible Futures www.jamesrobertson.com
9
Three Possible Futures
Work
BUSINESS AS USUAL Full employment can be restored
and employment will remain the dominant form of work. Other
activities (e.g. housework, family care, voluntary work) will continue to have lower status. Sharp
distinctions will continue to exist between education for the young,
work for adults. and retirement for the old; and between work and leisure.
HE Full employment will not be
restored. All necessary work will be done by a skilled elite of
professionals and experts, backed by automation, other capital-intensive technology, and specialist
know-how. Others will not work. They will merely consume the
goods and services provided by the working minority - including leisure, information and education
services. Society will be split between workers and drones.
SHE Full employment will not be
restored. Work will be redefined to include many forms of useful and
valued activity in addition to paid employment. Paid and unpaid work will be shared around more
equally, e.g. between men and women. Part-time employment
will be common. Many different patterns of working will be possible, according to people's
circumstances and preferences. Households and neighbourhoods
will become recognised workplaces and centres of production. Young and old will have valued work
roles. Working and Leisure activities will overlap.
Future Work: Annex to Chapter 1: Three Possible Futures www.jamesrobertson.com
10
Money
Incomes
Technology
BUSINESS AS USUAL Paid work will continue to be the
primary source. Society will continue
to provide a basic income to people
who fall outside this norm, but such
people, if of 'working age' will continue
to be stigmatised as exceptions.
New technologies will continue to be
developed for their own sake, because
scientists and design engineers find
them challenging and because
scientists and design engineers find
them challenging and because
industries and governments hope they
will prove profitable and that people
can be persuaded to use them. There
will also continue to be opposition to
many new technologies on the
grounds that they may be dangerous,
exploitative, wasteful, polluting and
socially undesirable or unnecessary.
HE The skilled working elite will be
highly paid. Proponents of this scenario have not yet worked out
through what channels everyone else will receive an income. From dividends, after nationalisation of
all production? Or from benefits financed by high taxation? Or as
wages from menial jobs?
Even more effort and resources than at present will be channelled
into the development of new technologies. It will be accepted that all problems have technical
solutions, and that top priority should always be given to the
technical approach, including the development of new forms of
expertise and reliance on the decisions and advice of experts. Opposition to this approach will
become weaker. Technology will be master.
SHE Society will pay everyone a basic
income as of right, enabling them to choose how they will divide
their time between paid and unpaid activities. People who do not need this earned income
because they can earn more on top of it will have it taxed back
automatically.
The development and diffusion of certain types of new technologies
and skills will have high priority. These will be technologies and skills which enhance the capacities
of people to do more for themselves and one another, and
reduce their dependence on outside systems, organisations and
professional expertise. In particular, small-scale (including micro-processor ) technologies will
greatly expand people's capacities to work for themselves and one
another within their own homes and localities. This scenario is not anti-technology. Technology will
have an important role, but as servant.
Future Work: Annex to Chapter 1: Three Possible Futures www.jamesrobertson.com
11
Economy
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Economic Growth can be restored. Creation of wealth by industry and commercial services can continue
to support publicly financed social services. Industrialised economies
will remain centralised, and big business and publicly owned corporations will retain their
dominant role. Formal economic activity will continue to be the only
kind of economic activity that really matters, and informal economic activity will remain
unimportant.
HE
Economic Growth will only be achieved by concentrating on high technology production and by
marketing highly professionalised services. The wealth thereby
created will meet society's needs. Formal economic activity will become even more dominant.
Multinational business will have an even more dominant role.
SHE
The most important areas for economic growth and social progress will be in the informal
economy. People's energies will be released to create wealth and
welfare for themselves and one another in their own households, neighbourhoods and localities.
The fact of so many people finding satisfactory occupation in this way
will remove many existing obstacles to the efficient functioning of the formal economy.
Within the formal economy, local small-scale enterprise will be the
main growth sector. Localities will become more self-sufficient
economically and less dependent on outside employers.
Future Work: Annex to Chapter 1: Three Possible Futures www.jamesrobertson.com
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Planning
and
Housing
Transport
BUSINESS AS USUAL Urban industrialised patterns of
lifestyle, employment and movement will remain the norm.
Residential and work locations will remain in separate zones. Planning regulations will continue to assume
that people use their homes for leisure and consumption activities
only. Houses will continue to be designed that way. The land, premises and equipment that
people need for their work will continue to be provided by
employers.
Traffic and transport patterns will
continue much as they are today.
HE The coming of the leisure society and the information age will help to reshape the built environment.
people will have more leisure time to spend at home, at local leisure
facilities (swimming pools, sports centres, etc), and on trips away from home. The provision of new
leisure facilities (including education) will make big new
demands on space. What precisely this will mean, for example in old inner city areas, is not yet clear.
A decline in travel between homes
and places of work will be matched by a rise in travel for leisure.
HE As more of people's work, leisure,
learning and caring activities centre on their homes,
neighbourhoods and localities, new demands for space and facilities will arise there. Today's house
designs, zoning arrangements, and planning regulations will become
inappropriate. More people will participate in planning and building their own houses and
environment. There will be more shared, multi-family households
and clusters of houses, including housing co-operatives. More people will need land, premises
and equipment for their own work. Residential densities will fall, in the
old city centres as elsewhere, and the tendency will be toward more
dispersed patterns of settlement countrywide.
A decline in travel between homes
and places of work will be only partly matched by a rise in travel for leisure.
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Energy
Food
BUSINESS AS USUAL Patterns of energy use and energy
development will continue much as at present. Changes will mainly be
prompted by adjustment to price changes and the balance of supply and demand.
Patterns of food production,
processing, distribution and consumption will continue to be
dominated by agribusiness farming, industrial manufacturing and the distribution of processed
and package foods through supermarket chains to
standardised consumers.
HE Demand for energy will continue to
grow. Dependence on capital-intensive, centralised, high
technology sources of energy (e.g. nuclear power) will grow. A few centres of energy production will
supply the whole populace of energy consumers. A 'hard' energy path will be followed.3
As for Business As Usual, but with more emphasis on new agricultural
and nutrition technology. For example, more productive strains
of animals and crops will be developed; beneficial elements (e.g. vitamins) will be added and
harmful ones (e.g. fats) will be removed as a normal aspect of
food-manufacturing and processing. People will eat out more often; fast-food chains will
be part of a food service industry expanding in response to the
growing 'leisure market'.
SHE Less energy-intensive patterns of
working, living and transport, coupled with conservation and
more efficient ways of using energy, will reduce demand for energy. Energy production will be
more decentralised. There will be a tendency to greater energy self-
sufficiency in regions and localities - and even, to some extent, in households where energy
conservation, heat pumps, solar panels, etc, will reduce the need
for energy brought in from outside. A 'soft' energy path will be followed.3
There will be, as for energy, a
tendency for greater food self-sufficiency. More people will grow
food, either as small farmers, part-time farmers and smallholders, or (for themselves) in their own
gardens and allotments. Food production will be more
decentralised and food distribution chains will be shorter. Food cooperatives will become more
numerous. Home cooking will be the norm. Multi-family purchasing
and feeding arrangements may become more common.
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Education
and
Learning
BUSINESS AS USUAL As at present, education will take
place in educational institutions at the hands of professional
educators. It will continue to be primarily for young people, before they enter the age bracket in
which they will be expected to have a full-time job. Its main aims
will be to provide them with the credentials to get and hold down a job, and to socialise them into
what will remain a mass-employment, mass-consumption
society. Main criteria of a good education will continue to be the certificates and diplomas that one
can show for it, and the jobs which it opens up.
HE Education will divide into two main
branches. The first will qualify a person for a high status job as a
member of the technocratic and professional elite. The second branch will teach people how to
use their leisure. Its status will be somewhat lower. Both types of
education will, in principle, be life-long. In the high technology, leisure society of the information
age, education will be one of the biggest growth industries.
Openings for professionally qualified, expert educators will greatly expand.
SHE Education will be for capability. It
will help people to learn life-skills of all kinds - physical, intellectual,
inter-personal, emotional. It will be geared to a pattern of living in which most people expect to have
part-time employment and also to undertake a good deal of useful,
rewarding activity for themselves and their family and neighbours. It will recognise that people often
learn better from doing things with experienced people than receiving
class-room instruction from professional educators.
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Health
BUSINESS AS USUAL Individuals and society will
continue to give lower priority to the promotion of health than to the
treatment of sickness. 'Health services' will continue to be primarily sickness services, and
people's perception of themselves as consumers of those services will
continue to dominate their perception of health. The main debate will continue to be whether
sickness services should be provided commercially or at public
expense.
HE Medical technology will solve most
health problems. Genetic screening, organ transplants, new
drugs, computer monitoring and computer records will eliminate or control congenital diseases and
handicaps, enable the body to be maintained in good operating
order, and enable expert physicians to deal more quickly and effectively than today with
their patients' problems - a widening range of which, such as
bereavements, losses and failures, will become subject to medical treatment. Health promotion and
sickness prevention may increase somewhat. But the increased
dominance of medical experts and technologists will ensure that
today's remedial bias remains strong.
SHE Greater personal responsibility for
health will lead people to the positive cultivation of their health
and to the positive promotion of a healthy physical and social environment. Higher priority will
be given to nutrition, public health and the psychosomatic aspects of
health than is given today. Personal self-help and cooperative mutual aid in matters of health
and sickness will be more highly rated than dependence on the
expertise of health professionals. People will learn to manage the health hazards and stressful
transitions in their lives. Nurture and care will be emphasised in
contrast to the 'heroic' interventionism of the HE future.
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Principles
BUSINESS AS USUAL Mass employment and mass
consumption. Dependence on institutions for work and for goods
and services. Obligation to be employed. Organisational values, masculine values, anthropocentric
values. Interventionist and instrumental mode of action.
Analytical and reductionist mode of thought.
HE Mass leisure and mass
consumption. Continued dependence on institutions.
Increased dependence on technology and experts. A schizophrenic society: the working
elite will be hard-working, responsible, and highly motivated;
the masses will enjoy leisured irresponsibility. Technocratic values dominant. Even greater
emphasis on organisational, masculine, anthropocentric values,
etc.
SHE A shift towards self-help and
decentralisation in production of goods and provision of services.
Reintegration of peoples' work with other aspects of their lives. This will bring new meaning to lives.
Personal values, feminine values, ecological values. Experiential
mode of action. Intuitive mode of awareness.
Future Work: 2. A Realistic Assessment www.jamesrobertson.com
17
2
A Realistic Assessment
If we ask which of our three futures — Business As Usual, HE
and SHE — the actual future of work is most likely to resemble,
the realistic answer must be that it is almost certain to contain
elements of all three. To some extent, work will continue to be
organised as jobs and money incomes will continue to be linked
with employment. To some extent there will continue to be a
widening gap between the activities of the more highly skilled
members of society and their less highly skilled fellow citizens, a
general increase in leisure, and a weakening of the link between
employment and income. And to some extent there will be a
revival of local economies, a growth of self-organised work, and a
blurring of work and leisure. A realistic approach to the future of
work and the problems of unemployment must therefore
encompass all three views of the future. Public policies should do
so, business strategies should do so, and so should people's
plans and thoughts about their own working lives.
However, if we ask which of the three visions opens up the
most helpful new insights from a practical point of view, we find
that a great deal of weight must be given to the prospect of
ownwork and the she future.
The Four-Sector Economy
One useful way of looking at it is to divide the economy into
four sectors, and to consider the future prospects for work in
each.1 The first sector contains big industry - the capital-
intensive, highly mechanised activities of extraction and
production such as mining, oil, chemicals, heavy engineering,
steel, ship-building, motor-manufacturing, and so on. The second
sector contains big services - the hitherto more labour-intensive
commercial service activities like banking and insurance, and
public services like education, health and welfare. The third
sector contains small local enterprises, including conventional,
small profit-making businesses, but also including a growing
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18
range of community businesses, community associations,
residents' associations, local voluntary activities, amenity
projects and other new kinds of local enterprise. The fourth
sector is the household and neighbourhood sector, consisting of
conventional forms of home-based paid work including self-
employment, and conventional forms of unpaid work like
housework, but also including a growing range of activities that
provide goods and services directly for oneself, one's family and
one's neighbours, such as food growing, home improvement, the
servicing and repair of vehicles and equipment, and many forms
of self-provided entertainment and care.
There is general agreement that, in the big industrial sector,
job losses will almost certainly continue to outweigh the creation
of new jobs. This sector has to compete internationally, and its
costs must be competitive with those in other countries - not
only the mature industrial countries of Western Europe and North
America, but also the newly industrialised nations, especially of
the Far East, whose labour costs are still comparatively low. This
will mean using the most efficient and advanced technologies,
including automation and the microprocessor. And that will mean
shedding more jobs. In fact, the big industrial sector is in a
Catch-22 situation, so far as the future of jobs is concerned.
Either these industries will be modernised successfully enough for
them to be internationally competitive, which will involve
reducing jobs. Or they will not be modernised successfully, they
will become uncompetitive, and they will then have to be further
slimmed down with the loss of many jobs. Either way, the
realistic assumption must be that the big industrial sector will
offer fewer jobs in the future than it does today.
In the big services sector, the last two decades have seen
more jobs being created in banking, insurance and other financial
and commercial services. But this is unlikely to last. Office
automation will lead to substantial reductions in staff.
Restructuring in the financial services industry, such as is now
taking place in the City of London where the old demarcation
lines between building societies, banks, the stock exchange, and
so on are breaking down, may have a similar effect. If there
should be a financial collapse, or an end to the long-term
expansion of financial institutions and the long-term growth in
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19
the role played by money in our lives (see Chapter 9), this too
would reduce the number of jobs in financial and commercial
services.
The question is whether these prospective job losses in
financial and commercial services will be offset or even, as has
been claimed, more than offset by new jobs in information and
communication industries like computers and cable television, in
leisure industries, and in public services like education, health
and welfare.
Tom Stonier2 is one of those who argue that "the major
problem confronting western governments in the 1980s is the
need to devise ways of effecting a smooth transition from an
industrial to an information economy - to shift labour from the
manufacturing to the knowledge industries. In part the answer
has to involve a massive expansion of an updated education
system to provide new, mainly information skills which will be
useful in a post-industrial economy". Stonier will not be surprised
if "the education industry becomes the number one employer
over the next few decades".
However, it is almost certainly naive to assume that in 30
years' time millions more of us than today will be employed in
the kinds of jobs that produce information and education. There
will be a limit to the amount of information that people will be
prepared to buy. And, as we have seen in the last ten years in all
the industrialised countries, including countries like France and
Sweden and Britain and Germany that have had socialist or social
democratic governments, the prospect of financing a massive
expansion of employment in services like education and health is
very slim. Some people say it would be possible to find the
money for a huge expansion of jobs in these services if the will to
do so existed. But this misses the underlying reality. This is that
employment is now becoming an uneconomic way to organise
many kinds of work. The nature of the employment relationship
is now making it increasingly difficult to get work done by
employees on terms, and to a standard of performance, which
are acceptable both to them and to the other parties concerned.
We shall return to this point later in this chapter.
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20
At all events, it is little more than wishful thinking to suppose
that enough new jobs will be created in the big services sector to
offset job losses elsewhere in the economy. It would be very
unwise to assume that full employment will eventually be
restored that way. It is more realistic to expect a declining, or at
best a stationary, level of jobs in the large-scale services sector.
This leaves us with the local enterprise sector and the
household and neighbourhood sector. The declining number of
jobs in the two big sectors of the economy, big industry and big
services, means that more people will be spending more time in
the local and household sectors. The amount of work done in
these two sectors will certainly expand. But, although some of
this will be in the form of conventional jobs, much of the new
work will not take the form of regular, conventional employment,
but rather it will be casual, and much of it either unpaid or semi-
voluntary.
As we shall see, the prospect of a very substantial expansion
of useful activity in localities, neighbourhoods and households is
of central importance. Not only does it provide the key to a
hopeful, indeed a better, future for work, it also offers hope for
dealing with many of the other economic and social problems
that late industrial societies now face. But before going further
into that aspect we should thoroughly satisfy ourselves that a
great increase in ownwork is, in fact, unavoidable; and that no
acceptable outcome from the present unemployment crisis will be
achieved merely by creating new jobs, or by expanding leisure,
or by some mixture of the two.
Restoring Full Employment — A Realistic Goal?
Apart from the hope that jobs lost in the industrial sector will
be replaced by new jobs created in the services and information
sector, the arguments put forward by those who still say they
think employment will remain the normal form of work and that
jobs can be made available for all who want them, are broadly of
three kinds. They rely on the possibility of economic recovery in
the short term; on the possibility of economic recovery in the
long term; or on a continuing reduction in the time worked by
employees.
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21
The possibility of recovery in the short term can be quickly
disposed of. Few people now seriously believe that short-term
economic recovery could restore full employment. Politicians may
continue to claim that employment will pick up as the recession
comes to an end, and that their particular policies will help to
make this happen. But many people now understand that, if
significant economic growth does take place in the next three or
four years, much of it will be jobless. There are not many who
see a realistic alternative to continuing high unemployment for
some years to come.3
The possibility that full employment might eventually be
restored by a new burst of economic growth in the longer term is
based on the theory of long waves, or 'Kondratieff cycles', named
after the Russian economist who worked them out and who died
in one of Stalin's Siberian camps in the 1930s.4 Kondratieff
showed that, since the industrial age began, there has been a
recurring pattern of economic prosperity and decline. The first
long wave began to rise in the 1780s, peaked around 1810 and
sank back into deep depression by about 1840. Beginning from
that point the second long wave rose to its peak in the 1860s and
fell back to its trough in the 1890s. The third long wave peaked
about 1920 and fell back into the deep depression of the early
and middle 1930s. A fourth long wave peaked around 1970. It
can be expected to continue falling until it hits bottom some time
in the early 1990s. At that point, assuming the long-wave cycles
continue to repeat, the fifth long wave will start to rise. We might
expect to get back to full employment some time around the year
2000.
The Kondratieff cycles of the industrial age have been
associated with marked bursts of technological innovation. For
example, the huge explosion of railway building in Britain after
1840 coincided with the upswing of the second long wave; the
rise of the internal combustion engine and electricity were
associated with the third; and so on. The theory is that the
introduction of new technologies triggers the new long wave;
then, as the wave proceeds, effort shifts to diffusing those
technologies more and more widely through the economy, and
for a time further technological invention and innovation slows
down. In due course the time comes when the diffusion of that
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22
wave of new technologies can go no further; the downswing then
begins. Eventually, the whole process starts again with a new
burst of technological innovation.
The argument, then, is that if we wait for another 15 years
and if the fifth Kondratieff cycle proceeds according to
expectation, we may eventually get back to something like full
employment. We have the prospect of 15 more difficult years
immediately ahead, but, so the argument goes, that is no reason
for casting aside the assumption that full employment will
eventually be restored and that employment will continue to be
the dominant form of work.
But think again about this. Can we wait another 15 years?
Shall we be able to leave it, as in the past, to the cycle of
technological innovation and change eventually to restore the
conditions for full employment? May not social forces compel us
to legitimate new ways of organising work and new ways of
providing people with their money incomes, before another 15
years of high unemployment have passed? Unless, long before
that time, some way is found of relieving the damaging effects of
unemployment on people's income, social status and personal
self-respect, the society of the late 1980s and 1990s is unlikely
to be prepared to endure continuing high unemployment as
peaceably as did the society that existed in the previous down
waves of 50, 90, 140 and 200 years ago.
And what if the industrial age is coming to an end? We cannot
necessarily assume that the long-wave pattern of prosperity and
slump, together with its effects on employment, that has
prevailed during the industrial age will prove a reliable guide for
the post-industrial future. As I have suggested, we may well
have now reached a stage of economic and social development in
which employment is becoming an increasingly difficult way to
organise many kinds of work on terms acceptable to all the
parties concerned. These include principally employees,
employers, customers and (where public services are concerned)
taxpayers. The increasing difficulty of organising work in the form
of employment has presented itself most clearly as
disagreements about pay and money: employees are only willing
to work for rising levels of pay which employers, customers and
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23
taxpayers feel they can less and less afford. (Attempts to dodge
these disagreements have been a principal cause of inflation in
recent decades.) These financial difficulties are reinforced by
features of employment that are absent from other forms of
work— the way employers and employees feel about each other,
and the management procedures, trade union practices, and
government interventions that go with the employment way of
organising work.
As I have said, the fact is that employment now seems to be
becoming an uneconomic way of getting work done. (The same
thing happened to slavery in its time, as both Adam Smith and
Karl Marx understood very well.5) This being so, employers will
continue, as a general rule, to try to reduce the number of their
employees, and many potential employers will continue to try to
avoid employing people altogether. Employers and potential
employers alike will from now on aim to minimise their
dependence on employment, and to find other ways of getting
work done. At the same time, as job opportunities continue to
become more scarce for people who would still choose to be
employed if they could, more and more of them will decide to
seek other ways of working. This new factor may very well
override the link between economic upswing and returning full
employment which has characterised the cyclical long waves of
the industrial age.
The third main argument used to support the idea that
employment will continue to be the dominant form of work, and
that employment will eventually become available for all who
want it, is that working time will continue to fall. People in jobs
will work fewer hours in the day, fewer days in the week, fewer
weeks in the year, and fewer years in a lifetime, than they do
now. This will mean that more jobs will be available for more
people. This, it is said, is the way we should set about restoring
full employment.
There is no doubt that something of this kind will happen. The
shorter working week, longer holidays, earlier retirement, more
sabbaticals, job-sharing — these and other ways of reducing the
amount of time people spend on their jobs — are certainly likely
to spread. A mix of part-time paid work and part-time unpaid
work is likely to become a much more common work pattern
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than today, and a flexilife pattern of work-involving paid
employment at certain stages of life, but not at others, will
become widespread. But it is surely unrealistic to assume that
this will make it possible either to restore full employment, or to
maintain employment as the dominant form of work.
In the first place, so long as employment remains the
overwhelmingly important form of work and source of income for
most people that it is today, it is very difficult to see how
reductions in employees' working time can take place on a scale
sufficiently large and at a pace sufficiently fast to make it
possible to share out the available paid employment to everyone
who wants it. Such negotiations as there have recently been, for
example in Britain and Germany, about the possibility of
introducing a 35-hour working week, have highlighted some of
the difficulties. But, secondly, if changes of this kind were to take
place at a pace and on a scale sufficient to make it possible to
share employment among all who wanted it, the resulting
situation — in which most people would not be working in their
jobs for more than two or three short days a week— could hardly
continue to be one in which employment was still regarded as the
only truly valid form of work. There would be so many people
spending so much of their time on other activities, including
other forms of useful work, that the primacy of employment
would be bound to be called into question, at least to some
extent.
To sum up, the prospect of a successful return to
conventional full employment, whether through short-term
economic recovery, or through a long-term economic upswing in
some years' time, or through a reduction in the time worked by
employees, does not provide any more realistic a basis for
dealing with the present crisis of unemployment and work, than
does the simple assumption that jobs lost in industry will be
automatically replaced by new jobs in services. Common sense
and compassion now demand that we work out the implications
of this — in other words, that we examine the possibility of
encouraging other activities in place of employment, of enabling
people to receive an income in other ways than from
employment, and of removing the causes of personal distress
and social damage that now attach to the condition of being
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unemployed.
Leisure In Place of Work — A Realistic Goal?
The idea that in a post-employment society employment
could be largely replaced by leisure activities, and that increasing
numbers of people could live lives of leisure, is open to serious
question from two points of view.
First, many people without employment would resist the idea
that they were expected to make no useful contribution, either
towards meeting their own needs or towards meeting those of
other people, and were merely expected to keep themselves
amused and out of trouble. They would resent the sense of
uselessness and futility which this would imply, and feel that
their lives were condemned to be empty of value and meaning. It
is not as if most of us today are heirs to an aristocratic tradition
of cultured leisure. We have inherited the protestant work ethic,
and the need to feel useful which goes with it.
Second, many of the people still in employment would resent
the idea that they were expected to support large numbers of
idle drones. The situation would be one in which the employed
were perceived as doing all the useful work and the unemployed
were seen, on a larger scale and a more permanent basis than
today, as making no useful contribution to society. People's
feelings would be very different from what they would be if being
employed were seen as only one of a number of ways of doing
useful work and of making a positive contribution to society.
The question of how to finance the leisure of the unemployed
in a leisure society would thus be a difficult one. They would
need a money income. Thus some extension of today's
unemployment and social security benefits systems would be
needed, perhaps going as far as the introduction of a Guaranteed
Basic Income (GBl). (See Chapters 4 and 12 for further
discussion.) But this would be much more difficult to introduce in
the context of a society clearly split between workers and non-
workers, than in the context of a society in which it was
understood that the purpose of the basic income was to give all
citizens the freedom to choose their own mix of paid and unpaid
work.
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Finally, if anything resembling the leisure society did come
about, one thing is sure. Many of those at leisure would in fact
use their time for useful activities of many kinds. In other words,
they would find ways of working on their own account, to provide
useful goods and services for themselves and for one another. A
leisure society would automatically transform itself, at least to
some extent, into an ownwork society.
In short, the prospect of moving towards a leisure society
cannot be accepted as providing any more realistic a solution to
the present crisis of unemployment and work, than the hope of
an eventual return to full employment. A vital element is missing.
This is the expansion of ownwork — that is, work undertaken,
often in forms other than conventional employment, in the local
and household sectors.
The Significance of Ownwork
The actual future of work, as I have said, will be one in which
employment, leisure and ownwork will all have a part to play.
One aim must be to improve the existing organisation of
employment — from several points of view, including greater
efficiency of results, more satisfying conditions of work, and
fairer distribution of the jobs which are available. Another aim
must be to provide improved opportunities for leisure. But no
less important than either of these will be to make possible a
great expansion of ownwork — in fact, there are compelling
reasons for giving this priority over both employment and leisure.
The first is that the expansion of ownwork will be a necessary
precondition to achieving the other two aims. Indeed, a
significant expansion is probably the only means now of creating
conditions in which an internationally competitive economy and a
firmly founded welfare state can flourish. This is because the
development of productive and useful work in the local and
household sectors will reduce the present dependency of
localities and households on jobs provided by the large-scale
manufacturing and service sectors of the economy, as well as on
goods and services purchased from these sectors or provided by
them at public expense. This reduction of dependency will have a
double significance. In the first place it will contribute directly to
the wellbeing of the localities and households concerned, many of
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whom are today suffering unemployment and hardship as a
result of failed dependency on employing and social welfare
organisations outside their own control. But also, by relieving the
big manufacturing and services sectors of their present function
of providing routine work and routine services for localities and
households which could organise such work and provide such
services for themselves, the expansion of ownwork will free those
organisations to become more efficient in their own proper
spheres. This will help big firms to become more competitive in
international markets, and enable the big service organisations
like the National Health Service to concentrate on the provision
of sophisticated, specialist services, like hi-tech hospital facilities,
which self-help and mutual aid at local and household levels
clearly cannot provide. In other words, the revival of the
household and local economies, and the expansion of the kinds of
work that contribute to them, will be a vital precondition for the
successful further development of the big organisations of the
national economy and the welfare state. It will, in fact, be the
essential feature of any successful strategy to improve the
efficiency and the international competitiveness of the economy
as a whole.
Another important reason for giving priority to an expansion of
ownwork is that it represents a new departure, a positive change
of direction, from the industrial-age path of development that we
have been on for the last 200 or 300 years. If we concentrate on
employment or leisure as the nub of the problem, we stay stuck
in the assumptions and categories of thinking of the industrial
age. Exploring how to encourage ownwork enables us to identify
many obstacles to further progress that arise directly from those
old assumptions.
A preliminary exploration of that kind is in Chapter 4. But first,
in Chapter 3, we shall look at some of the main characteristics of
employment that have evolved during the industrial age. This
historical background illuminates, by contrast, a number of
features of work that will be important from now on.
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3
The Age of Employment
Employment has been the way that industrial societies and the
industrial age have organised work. In no other societies and in
no other period of history has work been organised that way.
Pre-Industrial Patterns of Work1
In pre-industrial times most men and women worked in and
around their homes. The household was a place of production
and work. Its work was linked into the work of the local village
community. People provided the necessities of life for themselves
and their families. Money, therefore, played a smaller part in
their lives than it does in ours. Most of their work was unpaid.
Men and women divided the household tasks between them.
Children helped their parents at work as soon as they were old
enough; they got most of their education that way. The older
generation helped, too; grandmothers looked after the younger
children at home, while their parents were out working in the
fields. Work, like other activities, was thus an integral part of
family and local life. Not only were many of today's particular
specialisms unknown, but more generally, the economic and
social spheres of work were not then distinguished as separate
domains. The creation of wealth and the provision of welfare
were not treated as separate functions. The production of goods
and the provision of services by people for themselves and one
another were interwoven threads in the fabric of daily life.
It would be wrong to romanticise the nature of the family and
village life and work in pre-industrial times. Very few people in
today's industrial societies would want to return to that way of
life. Most people then were poorer and less healthy than we are
today. Their lives were shorter and less secure.
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They had virtually none of the technology that we now have,
and little knowledge of science or of the wider world beyond their
own locality. They had few of the entertainments, holidays and
travel opportunities open to us today. For many there was no
escape from the tyranny of the local squire; and, for many
women and young people, there was no choice but to accept
their subordinate position in the patriarchal household.
Nonetheless, the prevailing pattern of work had convivial2
features which employment today often lacks. Self-service, self-
help, self-reliance and co-operative mutual aid were
characteristics of that way of life and work. Economic and social
relationships then were predominantly personal and
interpersonal, not impersonal and organisational as they are
today. People generally had ready access to the means of
production the land, buildings, equipment and livestock they
needed for their work. No one then foresaw the day when people
would be dependent on employers to provide them with the
wherewithal for work, and when people would have no work to
do unless employers were able and willing to organise it for
them.
The Situation Now
In late industrial society the situation is quite different. Men
and women alike have been taught to look outside the home for
work for the kind of work that brings in money. We need far
more money than our pre-industrial ancestors did, to pay for the
goods and services that we no longer provide for ourselves and
one another. Moreover, we have become dependent on paid work
and other work outside the home to give us a sense of identity, a
social role, that the diminished functions of our households and
immediate neighbourhoods can no longer supply. Most of us need
such work to enable us to meet people, and to provide us with a
way of structuring our time needs which the isolated,
unproductive homes of late industrial society have become less
and less able to meet. 'I'm only a housewife' sums up the sense
of deprivation, loss of personal confidence, and lack of social
status experienced by the typical contemporary homeworker.
This change in the pattern of people's lives has been one of
the most important features of the way society has developed
during the industrial age. Once that direction of development had
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been established, it was cumulative and self-reinforcing. As more
and more people looked to paid work outside the home, so they
became less and less able to meet the needs of those —
especially the young and the old and the sick members of their
families — who had previously depended on their presence at
home. So, increasingly, those dependents had to look outside the
home too, to institutions like schools and hospitals, for their
education and care. And that, in turn, created new jobs in those
institutions — new openings for paid employment — which pulled
more people away from work in their homes.
Employment as Dependency
This change in the dominant pattern of work has transformed
people's lives and the life of society. The effect on people's
freedom to control their own work has been one of its most
important features.
Before the industrial age all human societies, except perhaps
hunter-gatherer tribes, had been societies of superiors and
inferiors. In ancient societies slaves had worked for their
masters, and in medieval societies serfs and villeins had worked
for their lords. Such societies had not claimed to be societies of
free and equal, fully developed people, in command of their own
work and sharing its fruits with their fellows. Now that employees
worked for employers, did this represent progress?
In theory, the replacement of serfdom and villeinage by paid
employment should have been a step forward. Relieved of their
old feudal obligations to their lords, people on the face of it
became free to offer their work as equals in the market place to
anyone who would buy it. In the last 200 to 300 years many self-
made men made out successfully in this way,3 and for many
women over the years the opportunity of employment outside
the home came as a liberation.4 But for many people the change
from feudal to industrial-age patterns of work had the opposite
effect. More powerfully than ever before it compelled the
majority of the population to work for other people. It resulted in
the division of society into two nations — employers and
employees — as society had never been divided before.5 As
Christopher Hill puts it, "What most men felt was not that new
doors had been thrown open but that old rights had been taken
away."6
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In England, the pressure started in the 16th century when the
monasteries were dissolved. With the resulting break-up of the
great feudal estates, most of the villeins were turned into
landless wage-labourers. Later the enclosures of the 17th and
18th centuries deprived the common people of their rights to
graze cattle, pick up timber, and hunt animals on the common
lands, and further increased their dependence on paid labour.
This was well understood at the time. Enclosure of the commons
was positively praised by contemporaries in the knowledge that it
forced labourers to "work every day in the year", and that "their
children will be put out to labour early".7 By depriving them of
any chance of economic independence, the "subordination of the
lower ranks of society would be thereby considerably secured".
Harsh penalties had been imposed on the workless poor under
the Poor Law from the 16th century, and harsh restrictions on
labour mobility under laws such as the great Statute of Artificers
of 1563. Enclosures now made doubly sure that for people who
had no property there was no escape from a semi-servile state
and from their "duty to work for their betters". So a pool of ready
labour became available for employers.
The coming of the factory system drove work out of the home
and brought a further loss of independence at work:
Weaving had offered an employment to the whole family: the young children winding bobbins, older children watching for faults, picking over the cloth, or helping to throw the shuttle in the broad-loom; adolescents
working a second or third loom; the wife taking a turn at weaving in and among her domestic employments. The family was together, and however
poor meals were, at least they could sit down at chosen times. A whole pattern of family and community life had grown up around the loom-shops; work did not prevent conversation or singing. The spinning-mills
which offered employment only for their children, and then the power-loom sheds which generally employed only the wives or adolescents, were
resisted until poverty broke down all defences.8
Masculine, Impersonal Work
Another feature of the employment age was the split that
developed between men's work and women's work. As
employment became the dominant form of work in the 19th and
20th centuries, the father typically became the breadwinner
going out to work, the mother the housewife staying at home.
Money loomed large in people's lives, with the paid work of men
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enjoying a higher status than the unpaid work of women.
Eventually this led women to insist that they should have rights
to employment equal with those of men, and women now have a
somewhat fairer deal where paid work is concerned. But progress
towards equality has been lop-sided; most men still remain
unwilling and unable to do their fair share of the unpaid work of
running the household and raising the family. They continue to
assume that the really important work is that done for employers
for pay, and so they give it priority. Most men have lost sight of
the possibility that they might devote their energies to their own
purposes, and work directly for the wellbeing and development of
themselves, their families, their neighbours and their friends.
As industrialisation progressed, the impersonal character of
employment, and of industrial society as a whole, became more
marked. In its early stages the employer/employee relationship
often remained a personal one, as it does in many small
businesses today. Employer and employee perceived each other
as individual people, and dealt with one another that way —
humanely or brutally as the case might be.9 But the technologies
typical of the industrial age required division of labour and
specialisation of work. They thus favoured large-scale
organisation. Having pulled work out of the home into the
factory, the new industrial technologies then led to the
replacement of small factories by big ones. Partly for this reason
— and partly because both capitalism and collectivism treated
workers as subordinate instruments of larger impersonal
purposes — personal control of employees by employers came to
be replaced by impersonal management systems.
At the same time, the urbanisation of work brought with it a
less personal, more anonymous, way of life in the great industrial
cities and towns. Moreover, as rail and then road transport
became established, people commuted longer and longer
distances to work. In today's late industrial society, many people
have come to accept that the energies which they channel into
their work will be expended far away from their nearest and
dearest, and on purposes unconnected with their home and the
locality in which they live.
So, although most people have come to take for granted the
form of work, i.e. employment, which has been dominant in the
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33
late industrial age, many have experienced it as disconnected
from other aspects of their lives and as having comparatively
little intrinsic value of its own. Many, perhaps most, employees
have not expected to achieve a serious purpose of their own or a
meaning for themselves through their work. They have worked in
order to be paid and in order to achieve self-esteem, social
respect, companionship and time-structure to their daily life.
Typical in this respect of their age and social background were a
group of young people studied in the Manchester area during the
1970s.
For those youngsters work is something to be endured in order to acquire the resources to enable the further enjoyment of non-work activities. It has no intrinsic value and nothing to commend it as an inherently
worthwhile activity — though, of course, certain sources of satisfaction can be found and these enclaves are highly prized as the primary source
of day-to-day diversion: 'Good mates', 'getting around', 'having a laugh'. Nevertheless it is not an area in which they locate any potential for personal achievement or improvement, and their interests and more
meaningful activities are either peripheral to, or entirely divorced from,
it.10
Job dissatisfaction has always been widespread among adult
workers too. For example, "For the many there is a hardly
concealed discontent. The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly
sung than the white-collar moan."11 And: "We find the blues of
blue-collar workers linked to their job dissatisfactions as in the
disgruntlement of white-collar workers and the growing
discontent among managers. Many workers at all occupational
levels feel locked in, their mobility blocked, the opportunity to
grow lacking in their jobs, challenge missing from their task."12
Exclusive Nature of Employment
However, the only alternative to a job which has been open to
most people in late industrial society — unemployment — cannot
provide the self-esteem, social respect, companionship and time
structure that people seek from work. People who have not had
employment, or have been ineligible for it, have been made to
feel inferior. Women are not the only members of society whose
work status has been downgraded during the industrial age by
the ever growing dominance of employment over other forms of
work. People reaching retirement age have been made to feel
their useful life is over. Teenagers not yet eligible to join the
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34
labour market have been made to feel they can make no useful
contribution. Unemployed people of working age have been made
to feel excluded and marginalised. Law and custom have
dissuaded old, young and unemployed alike from doing useful
work of an informal kind. Unemployed people have even been
forbidden to commit themselves to voluntary work or to self-
chosen courses of education and training, on pain of losing their
unemployment pay. The choice has tended to become a simple
either/or — either you have a job or you don't work, either your
contribution to the economy takes the form of a job or you are
perceived as a burden and a cost to be carried by those who do
have jobs.
These general pressures pushing everyone eligible into
employment have been reinforced by many others of a more
specific kind. Until very recently, personnel managements have
discouraged part-time jobs, especially for men. Pension practices
have discouraged flexible working lives and early retirement.
Social security arrangements have encouraged single parents to
seek full-time employment. Trade union pressures have sought
to reserve work for full-time employees. As continually inflating
land prices have made it more difficult for ordinary people to buy
land, and as the numbers of small firms and small farms have
declined over the years, the opportunities for self-employment
have declined, too. Only in the last year or two have there been
signs of change.
In short, so far as individual people are concerned, the
continually growing dominance of employment as a way of
organising work has tended to limit people's freedom to work for
their own chosen purposes and in their own chosen ways. It has
tended to limit their satisfaction in work if they are employed,
and to exclude them from what is regarded as useful work if they
are not. It has kept them dependent on increasingly remote
employers to provide them with work, and has made them
vulnerable to decisions about their work which are right outside
their own control.
Dependency of Local Communities
Much the same has happened to the work of localities as has
happened to the work of individual people during the
employment age. Local work has become increasingly controlled
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35
by decisions taken elsewhere. Just as households lost control
over their own work, so towns and districts lost control of theirs.
Just as people became enmeshed in the impersonal forces of the
labour market, so local communities became enmeshed in the
impersonal forces of national and international economies. Just
as the work of people became vulnerable to events far removed
from their own lives, so the work of local communities became
vulnerable to economic cycles, industrial innovations, and other
events far removed from theirs. Throughout the industrial age,
increasing specialisation and division of labour locally, regionally
and nationally diminished the capacity of local communities to
organise their work and secure a livelihood for themselves, just
as personal specialisation and division of labour diminished that
same capacity in individual people.
At the pre-industrial stage of development most local
communities, like most households, were much more self-
sufficient than they are today. Work done locally met a greater
proportion of local needs - for example, for food, clothing,
shelter, heat and power. External trading, accompanied by the
earning and spending of money outside the local community, was
a smaller part of economic life in most places than it is today.
As the industrial age progressed, local control of the economic
aspects of life seeped away. Just as most people became
dependent on employers to provide them with work, so —
similarly — most localities became dependent for their work on
employing organisations based elsewhere. Just as most people
ceased to be able to provide themselves with the necessities of
life and became dependent on buying them in, so — similarly —
most localities became dependent on goods and services brought
in from industries and public service organisations based
elsewhere. Just as most people became dependent on earning in
and spending out money, so — similarly — many local
communities came to be dependent on money coming in from
outside and going straight out again, not circulating locally and
thereby supporting local work. Just as in late industrial society
the family and the household came to be perceived as part of the
social rather than the economic domain, so the sphere of local
government came to be perceived as primarily social, not
economic. It is only in the last few years that in Britain, for
example, local authorities have begun to take on responsibilities
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for local employment and local economic development.
An extreme example of local economic dependency can be
found in some tourist districts. It is most obvious in islands — as,
for example, in Greece. In the tourist season, as the boatloads
and planeloads of tourists come in, they are accompanied by
boatloads and planeloads of food for them to eat, liquor for them
to drink, souvenirs and other holiday goods for them to buy, and
people to serve them in the restaurants and hotels. Little self-
sustaining local production or work is generated. When the
season is over, the tourists go home. All they leave behind is
rubbish — and the local people waiting for the next tourist
season.
That is, as I say, an extreme example. More typical forms of
economic dependency and vulnerability, found all over the
industrialised world, are where local economies have become
dependent on industries like ship-building, steel-making, railway
repair and manufacture, automobiles, nickel-mining, coal-mining,
or whatever other industry it may be, controlled by national or
multinational companies, or by national governments or
international government agencies, based outside the district. As
the economic climate has changed and these industries have
gone into decline, two things have become apparent. First, the
people who take decisions about the future of these industries
have no particular commitment to the localities affected; they
live elsewhere themselves; they are absentee landlords of their
industrial estates - absentee worklords, you might say. Second,
the people in the affected localities, having specialised in those
industries and having become dependent on them, have lost
whatever alternative skills and resources and alternative
traditions of work they might once have had. They now have no
capacity to organise work for themselves, which they can fall
back on. They are in a very vulnerable position.
In response to this situation, in many parts of the
industrialised world in recent years, representatives of central
governments and local authorities have been competing with one
another to attract new national and multinational employers to
their cities and districts. They are all looking for new industries
which will replace the old steel, or shipbuilding, or other,
industries whose decline has left high unemployment. In thus
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37
seeking to replace the old absentee worklords with new ones,
development agencies everywhere have blindly sought to
perpetuate the vulnerability of local communities to employment
decisions outside their own control. So deeply rooted is the
assumption that work must be externally provided, that it has
hardly occurred to these agencies to consider the possibility of
helping their communities to build up greater local economic
autonomy, including the capacity to organise local work to meet
an increasing proportion of local needs.
In the third world, too, the growing dependency of local
economies on outside control has followed much the same
principle. They became dependent on the cultivation of cash
crops for export to the industrialised countries. All over the third
world local people were persuaded, and often compelled, to grow
export crops like coffee, tea, tobacco, cocoa, cotton, sisal, rubber
and sugar, instead of using their land and developing their skills
to grow food, timber and other crops for their own use. Markets
for these cash crops have been altogether outside local control,
and terms of trade have usually been unfavourable. Moreover,
the production of these crops has typically been controlled by
companies based outside the country concerned - absentee
worklords again. Work which is organised and controlled in this
way is bound to be dangerously vulnerable to decisions and
developments over which the workers themselves have no
control at all.
As labour costs have grown in the industrialised world in
recent years, multinational companies have begun to move their
manufacturing operations to the third world, adding the features
of local economic dependency that have been characteristic of
the industrialised world to those that have accompanied the
production of commodities and cash crops for international
markets. In recent years multinational companies have also been
stepping up their efforts to make third world people more
dependent on the purchase of consumer products, babyfoods
being probably the most notorious example. One consequence,
as of any extension of the consumer society, has been to deepen
people's dependence on paid employment to provide them with
money to spend on consumer products which they cannot
provide by their own efforts for themselves.
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Limits to Employment
To sum up, two key features of the path of development that
has characterised all industrialised and industrialising societies
have been: the increasing dominance of employment over other
forms of work; and the increasing subordination of local work and
local economies to outside control. The principle in both cases is
the same. Just as individual people in their own households have
lost the freedom, and the capacity, and the habit, to meet their
own needs directly by their own work, and have become more
and more dependent on paid employment outside their own
control to provide them with money to buy goods and services,
so local communities have lost the freedom, and the capacity,
and the habit, to meet their needs directly by their own work.
They too have become more and more dependent on externally
organised work to provide an inflow of money from outside,
which is then spent on buying in from outside the goods and
services required to meet local needs.
In short, as the industrial-age way of organising work as
employment has become ever more deeply engrained in the
structures of industrialised and industrialising societies, it has
turned work into a form of activity which is dependent, remotely
controlled, and instrumental. Work in the post-industrial age will
have to develop in a positively different direction. It will have to
become more autonomous, more self-controlled, and more
directly related to the needs and purposes of those who are doing
the work. As we reach the end of the employment age, it is
becoming urgent to think out how to reverse some of the main
features of employment as a way of organising work.
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4
A Change of Direction
The change of direction to new, post-industrial patterns of
work will affect every aspect of human life and society just as
profoundly as they have been affected by the rise of employment
during the industrial age. This chapter gives a broad impression
of some aspects of this, and identifies some of the industrial-age
assumptions that will have to be reversed. The practicalities of
the transition to ownwork will be considered in greater detail in
Part 4.
As the last chapter made clear, the nature of work in the
industrial age has meant that the work of people and
communities has tended to be exploited for purposes not directly
connected with their own needs, or their own purposes and
values. This impersonal aspect of industrial-age work, and the
lack of a sense of personal and local responsibility for the results
of work that it has brought with it, have also contributed to
another important feature of work in the industrial age its
concentration on the exploitation, consumption and destruction
of natural resources. The vision of a SHE future, with ownwork as
a characteristic feature of it, foresees a new work order that is:
• saner, in the sense that people and communities will
have greater control over their work and greater
opportunities to use it directly to meet their own needs,
including the need for healthy self-development;
• more humane, in the sense that people's work will not
only be less exploited for purposes alien to them, but will
also be less exploitative and damaging to other people;
and also
• more ecological, in the sense that work will be more
concerned with ways to live harmoniously and
sustainably with the natural environment, than with ways
of exploiting it. These basic features of work in the post-
industrial age will have many practical implications.
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Energy
Work is closely related to energy. The word 'work' is derived
from the Greek word for work, ergon, and the word 'energy', also
derived from the Greek, refers to that which has work in it. In
other words, energy is the capacity for work. In science an 'erg'
is a unit of work or energy.
Throughout history the kinds of work people have done and
the ways they have worked have been connected with their uses
of energy. People have used the energies of other human beings;
of creatures like horses, cattle, donkeys and elephants; and of
the sun, wind and water. They have also used energies derived
from such vegetable and fossil fuels as wood, oil, coal and gas.
The industrial age has been the fossil-fuel age. Its prime
source of energy has been first coal, then oil. The availability of
these fuels, and the prevailing techniques for obtaining and using
them, have affected the very nature of work. So one question we
must ask is: What will post-industrial society use as its energy
base? And what will this mean for work?
The HE vision of post-industrial society assumes that nuclear
power will steadily replace existing, unrenewable sources of
energy. Such a society would thus be centralised. In its provision
of energy, it would be a Big Brother society, split between an
expert minority of producers a technocratic elite and a
dependent majority of consumers the latter denied the
opportunity of playing any part at all in meeting either their
energy or their other basic needs.
The change of direction we envisage, however, in accordance
with the SHE vision of post-industrial society in which ownwork is
the norm, is towards a society more decentralised and self-reliant
in its provision and use of energy, and in all else. Efficient use
and conservation of energy will reduce its consumption, and
therefore its need; the development of renewable energy sources
like the sun and wind will remove the need to develop nuclear
power; and the harnessing of such sources at local and
household levels will mean that many more people, not fewer,
will play a part in meeting their own and others' energy and
other basic needs.1
Moving in this new direction will also enable many more
people to channel their psychic, as well as their physical,
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energies into useful work. An important characteristic of the
post-industrial age will be a freer flow of people's energies into
the central activities of their lives.2
Technology
It was not only in meeting people's needs for energy for
warmth and power and light that the technologies of the
industrial age drove work out of households and local
communities into factories and offices, cities and towns. They
have had that effect on every kind of work. Thereby, they have
been socially divisive. The cottager can afford a handloom, but
only the factory owner can afford a powerloom. The smallholder
can afford a plough, but only the agribusinessman can afford the
agricultural technologies of the 1980s. Only the richer Indian
peasant can afford the technologies of the 'green revolution',
which then transform his poorer neighbours into his hired labour.
The Business-As-Usual view of the future assumes that
technology will still have this social effect on the organisation of
work. People will typically continue to work as employees for
employers, because only employers will be able to afford large-
scale technologies and have the capacity to manage large
organisations. The HE vision expects advances in technology to
accentuate the split in society between the elite workers and the
drones. The big technologies of the super-industrial future
nuclear power stations, automated chemical plants, automated
production lines, factories in space, and so on would be
controlled and operated by a very small number of people. The
rest of us would become redundant as workers. As consumers we
would become even more dependent than we are today on big
technologies and organisations, and on the people who operate
them and manage them.
The change of direction towards ownwork, on the other hand,
will reflect the fact that miniaturisation is now the new frontier of
technology. Whereas the technology of the industrial age drove
work out of the home and the neighbourhood, and deprived most
people of the freedom to control their work, the technology of the
post-industrial age will make it possible to reverse this trend.
Already the washing machine has largely replaced laundries, and
the home computer and many other advanced small-scale
equipments and 'user-friendly' materials for building, decorating,
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repairing, servicing, heating, plumbing, electrics, food growing,
food preparation, clothing and furnishing, are coming in. In a few
years' time small, programmable industrial robots will be
available, costing little more than the present price of a family
car. This will make it possible for small engineering workshops,
attached like garages to people's homes, to provide local
markets with many kinds of goods which economies of scale have
reserved for mass production during the industrial age. The
technology of the SHE future will be the technology of self-
service, self-employment and self-reliance the technology of a
society which enables free people to choose their own work.3
Environment
The dominant pattern of work in the industrial age, and the
ways in which we have used energy and technology, have
significantly affected the environment in which we live.
First, there have been changes that we tend now to take for
granted. The houses and the cities, towns and villages we live in
have been shaped, and have shaped themselves, around the
dominant work culture, i.e. employment. We now live in houses
which, for the most part, have been designed as places of
consumption and leisure rather than as places of production and
work. Domestic architecture on the one hand and industrial and
commercial architecture on the other have evolved to serve two
separated functions and to meet two separated sets of needs.
Similarly, in our cities, towns and villages the areas where people
live are generally separate from the areas where they work.
Planners have been taught that people work on employers'
premises, and have learned to separate the spaces needed for
living and working into distinct residential and industrial zones.
Planning regulations positively prevent many people from
working in or around their own homes today.
Patterns of transport, similarly, reflect the dominant pattern of
work. A sizeable proportion of rail and road traffic is commuter
traffic, that is people travelling from their homes to their places
of work in the morning, and back again at the end of their
working day. Much of the rest is business traffic transport of
goods and materials, and travel by people in the course of their
work. This reflects today's high degree of division of labour and
specialisation of work. People in their own place cannot now
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provide themselves with the products, services and skills they
need. These have to be transported in from elsewhere.
Then there have been the changes to the environment that we
notice as destructive and damaging. New ways of working in
agriculture have damaged the countryside, for example by
farmers grubbing up hedgerows and woodlands.4 New industries
have polluted water and air with chemicals. Heavy lorries
travelling through residential communities have spoiled people's
quality of life. New roads, new housing, new airports, new
factories have spread a blanket of concrete over more and more
land. Globally, today's ways of working are destroying the rain
forests, polluting the atmosphere and the rivers and lakes and
oceans, altering the climatic balance, and eliminating growing
numbers of living species. Increasing numbers of people are
beginning to question ways of working and living that put at risk
the biosphere, the fabric of life, of which we ourselves are part.5
The Business-As-Usual view of the future, which assumes that
employment will remain the dominant form of work, takes for
granted that today's patterns of housing, planning and transport
will remain basically unchanged. Insofar as the Business-As-
Usual view admits that further 'progress' of a conventional kind
may have damaging environmental effects, it relies on
conventional methods of restriction and control legislation,
financial inducements, international negotiation to limit the
damage so caused.
Since the setback to the credibility of tower blocks and other
aspects of the technocratic approach to housing and planning
that was typical of the 1960s and early 1970s, proponents of the
HE vision of the future have said little about the housing,
planning and transport implications of a leisure society in which
most people would have no work. Their assumption seems to be
that, as people became even more dependent as consumers and
clients on organisations and professionals than they are today
fast-food chains, cable television, universities for the elderly,
bereavement clinics, and so on new technologies and new
forms of professional expertise would enable housing, planning
and transport to adapt as necessary. So far as damage to the
environment is concerned, the HE view appears to take it for
granted likewise that scientific and professional expertise and the
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development of new and improved technologies will provide the
necessary solutions.
The change of direction which we envisage, however, will be
based, at least partly, on recognition that the prevailing patterns
of housing, planning and transport are closely linked to the
damage now being done to the environment. Both stem from the
kind of work that has been dominant during the industrial age -
work which has exploited people and nature alike as if both were
expendable resources. The patterns of housing, planning and
transport, and of industry and agriculture, towards which a
saner, more humane, more ecological future will require us to
move, will be those reflecting the new assumption that ownwork
is the normal form of work. And such a society will by its very
nature be more conserving of the natural environment.
In practice, this change of direction means that we must begin
to plan and build now.6 For example, more space will be required
in and around people's homes for productive work. When new
neighbourhoods and localities are planned and developed,
provision should be made for space and facilities that will enable
local production, e.g. of food and energy, to make a contribution
to local consumption. These will be particularly important
features of urban redevelopment, where the physical structure of
the old inner cities reflects the centralised, mass-production,
mass-consumption, employment-dependent character of the
declining industrial-age society.
Leisure7
As employment became the dominant form of work, the
distinction between work and leisure became sharper. The word
'leisure' means free time, and leisure activities came to mean
what people did in the time they had to themselves, as
contrasted with work which was what people did in the time
claimed by their employer. This distinction between work and
leisure has always been clearer for employees than for people
who have organised their own work, like housewives or the self-
employed. This is linked with the fact that, in general, men in
industrial societies have tended to enjoy more leisure than
women.
Another distinction between work and leisure became sharper
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as employment became the dominant form of work. As work
increasingly came to be activity which brought in money, so
leisure increasingly came to be activity on which money had to
be spent. A widening range of leisure industries and services
grew up providing leisure goods and leisure facilities. Some of
these were in the so-called private sector; people purchased
leisure goods like hi-fis and services like package holidays from
them directly. Others were in the so-called public sector; these
were paid for out of public expenditure, financed by taxation, and
the goods and services which they provided - like public
swimming pools - were available to people free or at a reduced
cost.
The shift from informal to formally organised work during the
industrial age was thus paralleled by a comparable shift in the
sphere of leisure. Whereas in pre-industrial societies most people
organised leisure, like work, for themselves and one another, in
late industrial societies they became dependent on the
organisations of the formal economy to provide them with leisure
activities as well as providing them with work.
One way of thinking about the future of leisure, as about the
future of work, is to ask who controls people's time.
Employment has meant that employees lose control of their
working time by selling it to their employers, and employers gain
control of their employees' time by buying it from them.
Something similar is true of leisure. As leisure industries and
services have developed, people at leisure have increasingly
spent their time on activities devised for them by others,
including commercial organisations and public services. By
contrast in self-organised leisure as in ownwork people take
control of the use of their own time. (There is, incidentally, a
close connection between control over time and control over
space. Employers normally control their employees' workspace,
just as they control their worktime. Most employees have no
workspace of their own. Similarly, leisure-providers normally
control the space, as well as the time, used for leisure by their
customers and clients.)
As people are required to spend less time in employment, they
will have more time for leisure. The HE vision of post-industrial
society foresees people spending most of this extra free time
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consuming leisure products and in leisure activities provided by
leisure industries, leisure services and organised entertainment.
People's leisure will be mainly outer-directed, just as their work
has been outer-directed in employment. The SHE vision, on the
other hand, foresees people using their increased free time in
accordance with their own perceptions of value and need. The
use they make of it will blur the distinction between leisure and
ownwork.
Another way of thinking about the future of leisure is to
distinguish between leisure activities that have to be paid for and
leisure activities that do not—just as one way of thinking about
the future of work is to distinguish between work that people get
paid for and work that they do not. For example, there are
leisure activities and facilities which cost a substantial amount of
money. Foreign holidays are one example. Local authority sports
centres are another. There are also leisure activities which cost
comparatively little money, like walking or reading. Thirdly, there
are leisure activities which save money. If you grow your own
food and do your own repairs, you can eat better and live better
for less money. Fourthly, there are leisure activities which can be
turned into money-earning activities. Hobbies like photography
and keeping chickens might be examples.
The Business-As-Usual view of the future of work assumes
that leisure industries and services will continue to grow. The
assumption is that people will still have jobs, and so will still have
money to purchase leisure goods and services and to pay taxes
and rates for public leisure facilities. The growth in this category
of leisure is itself expected to be a source of new jobs.
The HE view assumes that many people will not have jobs,
and will be dependent on being provided with leisure activities to
fill their time. In this case, there would be a sharp distinction
between the leisure-providers, who would be skilled and
dedicated workers, and the consumers of leisure, who would play
little part in providing or organising leisure for themselves - just
as, more generally, most people would play little part in meeting
any of their own needs. The question of how these leisure
activities would be financed, when many of the people enjoying
them would not be earning incomes from employment, is one to
which we shall return.
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47
As already outlined, a change of direction towards ownwork
and the SHE future will involve a shift of emphasis away from
leisure industries and services to leisure organised by people for
themselves. The dividing line between ownwork and this kind of
leisure will often be difficult to draw. People will make use of
their leisure - the increasing amount of time at their own disposal
— to do useful work on their own account, on their own interests
and on their own projects. Leisure activities will then shade into a
much wider range of work and activity options than most people
have today, when for most people leisure is what they have when
not at work, and the two main options are either to work or to be
unemployed.
Education and Training
Education and training in industrial society have been geared
to the assumption that work means employment. For most
people the purpose of education has been to prepare them to do
a job; the better their education, the better the job they have
been likely to get. Similarly, most training has been aimed at
preparing the trainee to function better as an employee in a
particular job. At the same time, a comparatively small elite have
been educated, not to become employees, but to take their place
as members of the employer class. One of the key social
divisions in education during the industrial age has thus been
related to the social division between employers and employees.
That social division was typical of industrial society at its peak. It
has retained its cultural and social significance in late industrial
society, even though many supposedly superior people— such as
top company executives, heads of universities, and
internationally renowned scientists - are employees of the
organisations in which they work.
The Business-As-Usual criticism of education in recent years is
that education has failed to prepare people properly for
employment. The outstanding new initiatives in Britain, for
example, have been to do with Youth Training and Work
Experience, in the sense of giving young people education,
training and experience that will equip them to be more effective
as employees.
The HE view of the future, on the other hand, stresses the
need for education in two particular fields. For potential members
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of the technocratic elite, education should concentrate on
instilling the skills needed for using and developing the new
advanced technologies, for example in the microelectronic and
bio-engineering fields. For the mass of the people, by contrast,
the key should be education for leisure, and education should
concentrate on preparing them to use the leisure time that will
loom so largely in their lives.
A change of direction towards ownwork will involve a shift of
emphasis towards education and training in the practical skills,
including the personal and interpersonal skills, that will help
people to live rewarding lives outside employment, to make
productive use of their leisure, and to do useful and satisfying
work of their own. Education for resourcefulness, self-sufficiency,
and co-operative self-reliance will be what is most needed.
Incomes
People who live in late industrial societies have to have a
money income in order to buy the goods and services required to
meet their needs. As a rule, we are able to meet few of our own
needs directly by our own efforts, as our pre-industrial ancestors
largely did.
Late industrial societies accept an obligation to ensure that all
their citizens do receive a money income sufficient to enable
them to subsist. But the assumption still is that the normal way
to get this income is from paid employment, either directly as an
employee or indirectly as a dependent of an employee. People
who get their income from the state, for example, in the form of
unemployment benefit or social security benefit, are treated as
unfortunate exceptions to this general rule. They are regarded as
second-class citizens, and are subjected to severe restrictions.
These limit their freedom to commit themselves to useful
activities, such as training or voluntary work (since these might
make them unavailable to take a conventional job, if one
existed), and heavily discourage them from trying to build up
paid work on their own account.
The Business-as-Usual view thus assumes that people who
don't have a job can do no useful work; that, if they want to
work, they should look for a job; and that the main objectives of
government policy should be to encourage this, while creating
conditions in which enough jobs will once again be available for
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all.
Both the HE and SHE views of the future believe that these
assumptions are out of date. They both believe that the high
level of unemployment which is in prospect for the next 10 or 15
years will mark a transition to a new work order in which full
employment will have become a thing of the past. They both
foresee that it will then no longer be normal for most people to
receive their money income in the form of wages or salary from a
job, and that it will have to become regarded as normal for
people to receive their money income in other ways, including
regular payments from the state. They both believe that this
must lead to an extension of the present system of personal
benefits, and its consolidation with the personal tax system, in
the form of an unconditional subsistence income or Guaranteed
Basic Income (GBI). All citizens would then receive an adequate
untaxed basic income from the state, and (in most versions of
the idea) be allowed the freedom to top this up with additional
taxed income if they chose to do so.
The HE vision of a leisure society looks upon the GBI as
providing a basis on which most people would be able to live
lives of leisure. But, as I suggested in Chapter 2, this raises
questions to which no answers are yet in sight. The level of
income required by people who were expected to do no useful
work of their own and to make no useful contribution to meeting
their own needs and other people's would have to be quite high,
and remain so permanently. The resulting financial problems and
the resentment of those who were still doing paid work and
paying taxes on their earnings to support the leisured, might
make this a difficult arrangement to sustain.
The SHE vision on the other hand, sees the most important
function of the GBI as a transitional one. It will facilitate the
change of direction to a new work order in which many people
will be enabled to do more work on their own account and meet a
greater proportion of their own needs by their own efforts. They
will then, in aggregate, become less dependent than people are
today both on the benefits system to provide all their income if
they are unemployed, and on other arms of the present welfare
state to provide them with social services. In other words, the
GBI will enable many individual people who are now unemployed
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50
or otherwise caught in the poverty trap which the present system
of benefits imposes, to make the transition to the point where
they can earn a taxable income on their own account; and, by
freeing people from the need to work in useless jobs or to spend
their time searching for nonexistent jobs, the GBI will give them
more time to care for themselves, and one another. By thus
reducing people's dependence on benefits and welfare services,
the GBI will help to reduce the cost of the welfare state and the
level of taxation needed to support it. It may even be possible to
hope that, as over the years people generally become rather
more able to do things for themselves and rather less dependent
than they are today on money to buy what they cannot provide
for themselves, the level of GBI required by most people to
support a decent life could eventually fall. (The GBI scheme is
further discussed in Chapter 12.)
Capital, Investment, Land
During the industrial age the assumption took root that
employers would provide the land, the premises, the equipment
and other forms of capital assets and working capital needed to
support people's work.
The Business-As-Usual view of the future takes for granted
that this will continue to be the case. Investment grants and
other forms of financial assistance, as well as depreciation
allowances to be set against tax, should therefore continue to be
given to employing organisations to encourage them to invest in
creating and maintaining jobs. Because employment is assumed
to he the only valid form of work, it follows that employers
should continue to be given this special treatment, even though
it amounts to discrimination against investment in other types of
work, for example in the household or local community. The HE
view, while not agreeing that the creation of employment will or
should continue to be a function of productive investment,
accepts nevertheless that large enterprises will and should
continue to be the main owners and controllers of productive
capital assets, that the most important forms of production will
still be those which are large and heavily capitalised, and that
today's system of financial institutions channelling flows of
investment from people to organisations will continue to provide
a valid pattern for the future.
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51
The SHE view, on the other hand, foresees a change of
direction in this respect as in others. The shift from employment
to ownwork will involve a shift in the ownership and control of
productive capital assets from employing organisations to people
themselves. In particular, new mechanisms and new institutions
will be needed to enable people to channel their savings into
investment in small-scale local activities of their own choice,
including local employment initiatives of cooperative, socially
beneficial types which will improve the locality in which the
investor lives. New ways will have to be introduced to enable
people with little or no capital of their own to build up 'sweat
equity' for themselves, for example by helping to build their own
houses and to develop their own new communities. New forms of
land tenure, including land-holding by community land trusts and
community development trusts, may be needed to enable people
without capital to build up a shared stake in the land which they
need for their work. More generally, new ways will have to be
found for decentralising the ownership and control of land, and
making it available to people and local enterprises needing land
for their work, on terms which they will be able to afford. Part 4
contains further discussion of the practicalities.
Future Work: Notes and References www.jamesrobertson.com
Notes and References
for Section 1
Introduction
(1) Reported in the United Nations publication Development Forum,
November 1982.
(2) The concept of 'another development' was articulated in the 1975
Dag Hammarskjold Report What Now? Another Development; in
Another Development: Approaches and Strategies, ed.
MarcNerfin, 1977; and in subsequent issues of Development
Dialogue; all published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation,
Uppsala, Sweden. Regular issues of the IFDA Dossier from the
International Foundation for Development Alternatives, Nyon,
Switzerland, have encouraged wide international participation in
the discussion.
(3) In particular, the outcome of two Turning Point meetings in 1980
was published as Turning Point Paper No. 1 on 'The
Redistribution of Work'. Major contributions were made by
Charles Handy (then Warden of St. George's House, Windsor
Castle) and Sheila Rothwell (Director of Employment Studies,
Henley). I recommend Charles Handy's subsequent book, The
Future of Work, Basil Blackwell, 1984. (Turning Point is an
international network of people who share a common
understanding that humankind is at a historical turning point.
Address: The Old Bakehouse, Cholsey, Near Wallingford,
Oxfordshire 0X10 9NU).
The Woodbrooke College conference on the future of work in
September 1982 led to the publication of Turn A New Leaf: Six
Essays On Work, Friends House, London, 1983. Among the
contributors was Guy Dauncey, whose two books The
Unemployment Handbook, 1981, and Nice Work If You Can Get
It, 1983 — both published by the National Extension College — I
also recommend.
Future Work: Notes and References www.jamesrobertson.com
(4) James Robertson, The Sane Alternative: A Choice of Futures, rev.
ed., Robertson, 1983. As I said there, Gurth Higgin's 'Scarcity,
Abundance and Depletion: The Challenge to Continuing
Management Education', Inaugural Lecture, Loughborough
University of Technology, 1975, provided an important stimulus
to my thinking about the future of work.
Chapter 1
(1) Detailed references are given in The Sane Alternative, see
Introduction, Note (4) above.
(2) For example, David Bleakley, Work: The Shadow and the
Substance, SCM Press, 1983, argues for alternative approaches
to employment and unemployment which will transcend the
conventional work ethic.
(3) Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths, Penguin, 1977.
Chapter 2
(1) This four-sector model emerged from an international discussion
at Windsor Castle in 1979 on the future of business
management. See my report on 'The Changing Expectations Of
Society' in Management for the 21st Century, Kluwer Nijhoff,
1982.
(2) Tom Stonier, The Wealth of Information: A Profile of the Post-
Industrial Economy, Thames Methuen, 1983. Stonier says that in
25 years "it will take no more than 10% of the labour force to
provide us with all our material needs".
(3) "There was virtual unanimity that full employment has gone for
good." From the report on 'The Future of Work' by OPUS (10
Golders Rise, London NW4), after the Work and Society
'Talkabout' in West Yorkshire in October/November 1983.
(4) For a readable account of Kondratieff cycles see Robert Beckman,
Down-wave: Surviving the Second Great Depression, Pan, 1983.
Also see Christopher Freeman's 'Science, Technology and
Unemployment', Paper No. 1 in Science, Technology and Public
Policy, from Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex University,
1982.
(5) See the references to slavery in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
and Karl Marx's Capital.
Future Work: Notes and References www.jamesrobertson.com
Chapter 3
(1) Useful background on the work of the household and community
in pre-industrial society will be found in Edward Shorter's The
Making Of The Modem Family, Fontana, 1977; and Peter Laslett's
The World We Have Lost, Methuen, 1971.
(2) Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, Calder and Boyars, 1973.
(3) "The self-made man was the ideal entrepreneur, the man without
any initial property or patronage, no education other than self-
education, or any advantage other than native talent, who by
self-help and force of character made his way to wealth and
status." Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modem English Society,
1780-1880, RKP, 1969.
(4) "From one end of Europe to the other, young unmarried women
in the 19th century were rejecting traditional occupations in
favour of paid employment. . . Young women in particular who
left home to accept work in London were not so much responding
to economic opportunity as to a means of independence from the
often severe restraints on behaviour inherent in rural family life,
dominated by the Victorian paterfamilias." E. Shorter, Making of
the Modern Family.
(5) Disraeli, Sybil; Or The Two Nations, OUP World Classic, 1981
(first pub. 1845). Also see Karl Polanyi's The Great
Transformation, Beacon, 1957.
(6) Christopher Hill, Reformation To Industrial Revolution, Penguin,
1969.
(7) All quotations in this paragraph are from C Hill, Reformation.
(8) E. P. Thompson, The Making Of The English Working Class,
Penguin, 1968.
(9) Examples of brutality will be found in E.P. Thompson, Making of
the E.W.C.
(10) Graham Marshall, The Best Years Of Their Lives: Schooling,
Work And Unemployment In Oldfield, William Temple Foundation,
Manchester Business School, 1980.
(11) Studs Terkel, Working, Penguin, 1977.
(12) 'Work in America', Special Task Force Report to the Secretary of
Health, Education and Welfare, Cambridge, Mass., 1973, quoted
by Harry Braverman, Labor And Monopoly Capital: The
Degradation Of Work In The 20th Century, Monthly Review Press,
1974.
Future Work: Notes and References www.jamesrobertson.com
Chapter 4
(1) Daniel Deudney and Christopher Flavin, Renewable Energy: The
Power To Choose, Norton/Worldwatch, 1983.
(2) Humanistic psychology and other 'new age' thinking about
personal growth emphasises the importance of unblocking
people's psychic energies and releasing them into creative
channels. See, for example, the index references to 'energies' in
Roberto Assagioli's Psychosynthesis, Turnstone, 1975.
(3) Further reading on technology 'as if people matter' is in E.F.
Schumacher's Good Work, Cape, 1979; and George McRobie's
Small Is Possible, Cape, 1981.
(4) Marion Shoard, The Theft of the Countryside, Temple Smith,
1980.
(5) The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the 21st
Century, Penguin, 1982, concluded that "if present trends
continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted,
less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than
the world we live in now", and that "prompt and vigorous
changes in public policy are needed to avoid or minimise these
problems before they become unmanageable".
(6) The Town and Country Planning Association (17 Carlton House
Terrace, London SW1Y 5AS) and its journal, Town and Country
Planning, are a valuable source of information and ideas. So are
John Turner, author of Housing by People, Marion Boyars, 1976,
and his colleagues at AHAS (PO Box 397, London E8 1BA). Also
see John Adams' Transport Planning: Vision and Practice, RKP,
1981.
(7) Leisure studies, including academic research and business
consultancy, have mushroomed in recent years. See, for
example, Stanley Parker's Leisure and Work, Allen and Unwin,
1983. I have learned much from W.H. Martin and S. Mason,
whose Leisure and Work: The Choices for 1991 and 2001, Leisure
Consultants, 1982, provides a good overview for readers from
businesses and other organisations.